Just days before President Trump’s inauguration, a small banner appeared at the top of the American Climate Corps’ website: “This is historical material ‘frozen in time.’”
In a flurry of first-day executive actions, Trump ordered all activities, programs and operations associated with the corps to be “terminated immediately.” On Monday, the site disappeared entirely.
It marked the quick death of a program the Biden administration struggled for years to get off the ground.
Like many promises in former President Biden’s climate agenda, the corps failed to gain traction in Congress, leaving the administration with little money to fund it. What started as a multibillion-dollar vision to supercharge climate action across America, ended up primarily as a job board on a federal site, advertising climate service jobs around the country.
Organizations that partnered with the corps to employ young people in climate jobs and a former White House senior official said that while the ACC did help catalyze national climate action, most of the independent programs branded under the ACC will continue largely unaffected.
To those deeply involved in the corps’ operations, Trump’s election dashed a hope that a bare-bones ACC would grow into something bigger and more tangible.
“The writing was on the wall,” said Dan Knapp, executive director of the Conservation Corps of Long Beach, which joined the ACC as a partner organization in 2024 and has more than 100 corps members.
The vision of a nationwide service corps to address climate change began as a 2020 campaign promise by then-candidate Biden. Once he was in office, the ambitious and expensive Build Back Better bill proposed allocating more than $5 billion to fund climate corps positions in the National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs.
But the Inflation Reduction Act that ultimately passed in 2022 included many cuts in concession to Republican demands and made no mention of a climate corps.
A year after Biden signed the IRA into law, he announced he was creating the corps anyway. After another seven months, on Earth Day 2024, the president announced the launch of the corps’ website and the opening of climate service positions across the country. While Biden’s original goal was to recruit 300,000 corps members for the ACC, by the time the website went live, the target had been dropped to 20,000.
A final newsletter from the ACC on Jan. 15 stated it had reached that goal — and warned its website would soon go dark. Most of the positions the ACC counted toward its 20,000 goal had already existed as roles in other independent organizations and government agencies.
For example, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California Climate Action Corps, founded in 2020, joined the ACC. So did an existing network of local corps around the country, including the Conservation Corps of Long Beach and the San Jose Conservation Corps. These programs will continue to exist regardless of ACC’s future, their leaders said.
Both the California Climate Action Corps and the Conservation Corps of Long Beach had members actively assisting in Los Angeles’ wildfire disaster relief efforts when Trump signed the executive order killing the ACC. The development went largely unnoticed by corps members assisting in debris removal and staffing disaster centers and food banks.
“It does not impact any of our members,” said Josh Fryday, the governor’s chief service officer who oversees the Climate Action Corps, or “any of the momentum we’re building in California.”
By creating a national ACC brand and launching an ACC job board, the Biden administration hoped to capture the attention of young people eager to address the climate crisis who were deeply engaged with national politics, then connect them with local opportunities to serve, a former White House senior official said.
It seems to have worked: After the ACC launched, the number of applications received by the California Climate Action Corps’ climbed from four for every open position to six.
The ACC also gave its members a sense of national camaraderie. “I think, for them, the biggest part is just belonging to a larger movement,” Knapp said. “I think that’s what they’re going to lose more than anything else.”
Even without congressional funding for the ACC, the White House still managed to create a few hundred federally funded positions — including in the Environmental Protection Agency and in the departments of Energy, Interior and Agriculture — primarily by partnering with AmeriCorps, the country’s service corps agency.
The ACC also helped roughly a dozen states form their own climate- and conservation-oriented service corps — similar to the California Climate Action Corps — which relied on both state and federal money.
The ACC’s supporters and trailblazers hope these pockets of new federal and state climate-oriented corps jobs can weather the new administration, even now that the ACC is gone.
“In many ways, the strategies will stay the same, which is to continue to work with states that want to harness the energy of young people to tackle climate change,” Fryday said. “Even with the new administration, climate change isn’t going anywhere in the next four years.”
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